I’m not sure what’s easier, to lose track of who you are or never know to begin with. I’m pretty sure that I’ve lost track of the lost track. For years I invested more into a video game than real life. Whenever I finally stopped I had dreams about the game. I still dream about it. You can’t do something for years and merely forget about it. It sticks with you. I started believing that I was not a social person in order to stay on the computer deep into the nights I should have been meeting people or reckoning the earth like Walt Whitman advised. Once, during my senior year of high school my best friend and I took a bike ride and plunged down a long, steep hill. I could hear him yelling behind me, “This makes you know you’re alive!” I had a weird sort of ache. I had been standing on the outside of it for a long time.
I had a friend for a while that was never confident that I really liked him. I tried to tell him that I never even thought about it—but after he kept on bringing it up it wasn’t true anymore. I started thinking about it and realized he made me feel uncomfortable. He told me once that he made a list of all his best friends and that I was on that list, but that he thought about what my list must look like and didn’t think that his name was on it. He waited to say this until I was in his truck an hour from home. After that I kind of kept my distance. I hadn’t talked to him for about three months and then all of the sudden he’s on the phone with me asking how things have been. I was in the middle of being at a loss for words when he told me that he’d been earning some extra money recently and that he thought I’d be interested in hearing about a great money making opportunity. I groaned. I had a girlfriend about eight years ago that went in for something similar. I can’t really remember what either of them told me we’d be selling together, but my ex girlfriend started never being able to spend time with me because she was always at some rich guy’s house to learn how to run her own business. The rich guy had an outdoor pool and basketball court. He had a grill and a big patio for everyone to sit and eat his hamburgers while he told them how he used to salt the fries at BurgerTown until one day he started his own business and now look, he’s got on a fancy apron and he’s flipping burgers on his own time. Well, I was never really too excited about the program. People that join pyramid schemes never recognize the distance that is or isn’t between people. They don’t realize that having someone to talk to or eat a hamburger with is something that you can’t quite put a dollar sign on. People like that can’t eat a hamburger with their own brother without worrying about how much it’s costing them. So, when the guy was telling me about how having this business was sort of like having someone from the treasury department show up at the front door with briefcases full of money all the time, I hung up the phone.
For a long while there when I was a kid, my best friend was my cousin. She was a couple years younger and she liked to follow me around. She was a very good follower if you want to know the truth. She always let me choose what game we’d play. I was sort of like the president of our friendship I guess. But there was one particular night I didn’t want her to follow me. I told her to stop and she cried. My uncle came along and sort of tried to explain the whole thing. “She just wants to follow you around” he said. I understood that actually. It’s just that I think I was scared of the attention. I mean, if someone follows close enough they’re going to see something you don’t want them to see. But sometimes you just have to let people follow you around. To tell you the truth I’ve cried more than once after giving my cousin a hug and then parting from her.
I have a new friend from Iowa. When she calls I’m told I’m getting a call from Iowa. It’s not true though. She lives here in Indiana. She’s never calling me from Iowa. But she sounds like she might be. She sounds like she could be sitting in the middle of Iowa somewhere and so in that way I feel like I’m talking to someone in Iowa. I guess she thinks like someone from Iowa too. I’m not exactly sure what that is yet. She sits up very straight in class though and when I talk to her she focuses on me and I can tell she lets herself be consumed with what I’m saying. I picture her as a magnet and all my thoughts being metal pieces that she draws to herself. All of this has got me wishing that I’d get more phone calls from Iowa.
I rode my first and last roller-coaster ride when I was 22. I was working at a summer camp and at the end of the week we took all the campers to Holiday World. There was a girl named Jenny that I had become friends with and she wanted me to go on a ride with her. I was happy for her to ask me so I agreed. She pointed to some colossus of a wooden roller coaster and my heart sort of sank. It was so crazy I screamed. I screamed while I was standing in line and Jenny laughed and said I would love it once we started to really go. While they buckled us up I was in a cold sweat. During the everlasting minute it took for the car to make it to the drop-off point my knuckles went white from gripping the safety bar. At the drop my fears vanished like leaves in late fall. Jenny shouted to me to raise my arms up and we plunged down a steep wooden ravine and I felt like I was free. After we came to a stop Jenny squeezed my hand and thanked me for riding with me. Her face was full of freckles and youthful joy.
